ADELANTO — The marquee outside Desert Trails Elementary School lists the events for the last two weeks of school: a talent show, kindergarten and sixth-grade promotion ceremonies and, on June 14, “school ends.”

When the 2013-14 school year ended on Friday, the Adelanto Elementary School District held their last class on the Desert Trails campus for the foreseeable future. The High Desert school was wrested from the district through the first-ever successful implementation of the state’s 2010 parent-trigger law, which gives parents the ability to choose from a selection of sweeping changes they can enact if they can gather signatures from more than 50 percent of a failing school’s parents.

“Seven student days left,” Principal Dave Mobley said in his office last Wednesday.

The school’s closure means staff and teachers will ripple out to other positions in the district. Three sixth-grade teachers who were hired on one-year contracts after the parent-trigger process began will not have their contracts renewed, and the district issued pink slips to 13 other teachers, citing the potential loss of revenue caused by Desert Trails Elementary students attending the new charter school instead.

“I think for the majority of the staff, we’re ready to move on,” Mobley said.

Prepping the prep

In October 2012, petition signatories voted to have the school reopen under the management of Debra Tarver, who also runs LaVerne Preparatory Academy in nearby Hesperia. The academy has one of the top 20 test scores in the county and the highest in Hesperia Unified: a 911 Academic Performance Index in 2012. Desert Trails Elementary received a 699 API, 30 points below the district average.

“The teachers have been hired: I gave out the contracts last week,” she said.

There have been some bumps along the way: Tarver has had to clear up misconceptions that the academy won’t be offering special education services at the school or that they’re limiting enrollment to high achievers.

“It’s just a lot of misinformation out there,” she said. “If this was a school I was building from the ground up, it wouldn’t be complicated at all.”

She’s done it before: Tarver set up LaVerne Prep in five months, after she parted ways with the charter school where she previously served as principal.

“And we’re doing it again,” she said. “We’re enrolling kids at the park, at the Stater Bros, because we don’t have any other place to do it. “… We do it the hard way, no matter what.”

Parent Revolution, the nonprofit that helped get the parent-trigger law passed three years ago, and which has helped organize parent-trigger campaigns around Southern California is now out of the process, according to policy director Christina Vargas.

“Even if we wanted to be more involved in running schools, we can’t be,” Vargas said. “She’s the only one with the legal right to run the school. “And what are we going to tell Debbie about how to run a school?”

But Vargas said Tarver has ended up serving as a surrogate for Parent Revolution for many of those angry about the parent-trigger movement.

“She’s unfortunately taking some of the heat, which I think is misdirected,” she said. “She didn’t have anything to do with anything that’s gone on before, she just wants to run a good school.”

‘It’s been a battle’

Cynthia Ramirez, lead parent coordinator for Desert Trails Parent Union, will have two children at Desert Trails Preparatory Academy next year: a second-grader and a kindergartener.

She first noticed a problem when the older child first started kindergarten at Desert Trails Elementary: “I started hearing they don’t get homework because all the schoolwork has to be done on campus, because of budget cuts.”

In first grade, homework came home dated 1997, having been recycled for more than a decade.

When Ramirez began volunteering on campus, she said she started hearing about in-fighting between teachers.

“The teachers couldn’t agree with the teachers, the (former) principal couldn’t control the staff.”

Complaints made to the district went nowhere: “They would tell us anything they could to get us out of there.”

No one individual or group is to blame for what all sides acknowledge is a troubled school, according to Adelanto District Teachers Association President La Nita Dominique.

“Just like a deteriorating marriage, everybody has a part,” she said.

The decision to start the parent union has divided the school and turned friends against one another.

“It’s been a battle, I’m not going to lie. There are days I want to turn and run away, but I do it for them,” Ramirez said, nodding at her kindergartener, playing on a nearby jungle gym at the park adjacent to Desert Trails Elementary.

The stress eventually got to be too much for her husband: “He was fearful of me driving here; he didn’t know if I was going to get attacked.”

Bartola Del Villar has three children who will be attending Desert Trails Preparatory Academy when it opens, including first, third- and sixth-graders.

“I live around the corner here,” she said. “Why should I have to go out of the way to find a good school? The only option they gave is to transfer to another school that’s failing.”

According to Del Villar and Ramirez, the district denied parent requests to transfer their children to schools in the neighboring Victor Elementary School District, which has an average API score 75 points higher than the schools in Adelanto.

AESD Superintendent Lily Matos DeBlieux, who was appointed in February, after Tarver’s charter application was already approved, has worked hard to open the lines between parents and school officials, starting up a parent/superintendent council and hosted a community forum in April attended by more than 1,000 people.

“We had parents cry,” she said. “‘No one had ever done this for us before.'”

State test scores show that three-quarters of Desert Trails Elementary students are unable to read or write at grade level, leading the AESD to invest in the pricy Success for All literacy program that Mobley said has led to real improvements this school year.

“Did we need to make changes? You bet. Do we still need to make more changes? Absolutely,” he said. “If we’d started (reforms) two years before, we would have done it.”

With the loss of Desert Trails Elementary, neighboring West Creek Elementary is now the AESD’s neighborhood school for students living near the Desert Trails campus, but Mobley said he believes many of the 620 students currently enrolled will end up going to Desert Trails Preparatory. Mobley estimates about two-thirds of current students will attend the charter school; Tarver said she currently has about 500 students enrolled.

Chrissy Guzman’s two children at Desert Trails Elementary School, a third grader and a sixth grader, will not be among them. Her friend Lori Yuan has two children at the school, a second grader and a fourth grader. They said the parent trigger process has left deep wounds in the Desert Trails community.

“It’s very divided,” Yuan said.

“No one talks to each other now, no one wants to be associated with each other,” Guzman said.

Guzman and Yuan blame the school’s poor test scores on the large number of students who are new on the campus each year.

“We have such a high transience rate; they come in and out,” Guzman said. “We don’t live in Beverly Hills; I don’t care what you say.”

Putting it behind them

The end of the school year won’t erase the scars left behind by the parent-trigger process, according to Yuan.

“It’s anxiety all around,” she said. “Even the kids staying here, their friends are going every which way, the teachers are going every which way, the lady at the front desk will be different. It’s just a mess.”

Still, the school’s staff hopes to put these past two years behind them as soon as possible.

“I’ve heard from a lot of teachers ‘I just want to enjoy teaching again and not worry about the politics,'” Mobley said.

Desert Trails Elementary School was the first successful use of the parent trigger law: A previous attempt in Compton failed, but subsequent attempts in Los Angeles and Watts have succeeded.

“Education is starting to change and more parents are getting involved,” Tarver said. “I just wish we’d all do it together.”

Desert Trails may not be the last attempt to take place in Adelanto.

“Now, I have to worry about seventh, eighth, ninth and high school. We’re still not done,” Ramirez said. “I’m already looking to see if I have to trigger another school. And on high school. It’s a never-ending story for us.”

And Parent Revolution will be back, according to Guzman.

“They are the ones trying to take over the High Desert,” she said. “They’re trying to take over Columbia (Middle School) next.”

No new parent-trigger petitions have been circulated and the president of Adelanto’s teachers union hopes it won’t come to that.

“We saw how it unfolded the first time,” Dominique said. “I can’t imagine that anyone wants to go through that again. There has to be a better way.”

Desert Trails Timeline

2005-2006 school year: After years of failing to meet federal benchmarks, Desert Trails Elementary School is listed as a program improvement school requiring dramatic action to turn around.

June 2011: Desert Trails parents meet with the Los Angeles nonprofit Parent Revolution about ways to reform the school.

Jan. 12, 2012: The Desert Trails Parent Union submits a petition to the Adelanto Elementary School District, the first step in enacting the state’s 2010 parent trigger law.

Feb. 21: The district rejects the petition, citing errors made by petition gatherers. Some of the 97 signatories want to take back, leaving the parent union 16 signatures short of the 50 percent necessary to invoke the parent trigger.

March 6: The parent union submits an updated petition with more signatures.

March 28: The school board rejects the petition, saying it’s 20 signatures short of 50 percent.

July 23: A Victorville Superior Court judge orders the district to accept many of the signatures it rejected, meaning the parent union has met its 50 percent goal.

Aug. 17: Citing an inability for the parent union to turn Desert Trails into a charter school in time for the 2012-2013 school year, the school board chooses a non-charter school option in the parent trigger law, offering parents spots on a new advisory board. The parent union vows to continue with its charter school effort.

Oct. 5: The parent union receives proposals from charter schools in Apple Valley and Hesperia on how they’d run Desert Trails Elementary.

Oct. 12: A Victorville Superior Court judge orders the school district to allow the parent union to turn the school into a charter school in the 2013-2014 school year.

Beau Yarbrough wrote his first newspaper article taking on an authority figure (his middle school principal) when he was in 7th grade. He’s been a professional journalist since 1992, working in Virginia, Egypt and California. In that time, he’s covered community news, features, politics, local government, education, the comic book industry and more. He’s covered the war in Bosnia, interviewed presidential candidates, written theatrical reviews, attended a seance, ridden in a blimp and interviewed both Batman and Wonder Woman (Adam West and Lynda Carter). He also cooks a mean pot of chili.